Procedures for the design of responsive communication protocols

A protocol is said to be responsive if it satisfies the timeliness and stabilization requirements in addition to satisfying the safety and liveness properties. This paper addresses the problem of designing stabilizing communication protocols modeled by communicating finite state machines. A stabilizing protocol is a protocol which, if started from or reaching any illegal state, will eventually reach a legal stage from which it resumes its normal execution. To achieve stabilization, the protocol must be able to detect a transient error, and then it must recover from that error and revert to a legal protocol state. The latter issue is addressed for which efficient recovery procedures are described.